00:01:18.860However, because the idea of going to retrieve the Golden Fleece was such a tantalizing prospect for glory and renown and heroic deeds,
00:01:30.340of course, it brought with it, when news spread that this was going to be undertaken, some of the greatest heroes from across Hellas at this time.
00:01:39.760We've got Polydeiches, we've got Peleus, father of Achilles, we've got Telamun, father of Ajax, we've got Idus, we've got so many, so many characters.
00:01:52.540And so far, they have weathered a lot of their problems, because they have had with them the mightiest hero of all, Heracles.
00:02:01.720And just at the end of book one, as we were recounting at the end of the last part, the crew very absentmindedly leave Heracles behind on the shore when they're going up the Pontos.
00:02:16.780Which is preposterous. How can you forget Heracles?
00:02:19.180Yeah, the guy who's like seven foot tall and bulking. You're like, oh, I just didn't notice he hadn't boarded the ship.
00:02:25.660But it is explained to Jason and the other Argonauts, before Jason has a mutiny on his hand, as the Argonauts force him to go back for Heracles, that actually this is all part of divine will.
00:05:58.280and more complex solutions have been adopted.
00:06:02.280And people do echo this in their thinking.
00:06:06.040Yes. And we're actually about to see an example of that play out now, because at the start of book two, we're immediately launched into the Argonauts stumbling upon a place called Bithynia.
00:06:19.680and there just so happens to be a particularly terrible king called Amicus, who is the king of
00:06:27.280the Babrekians, which are something of a savage tribe. They're just very aggressive, right? They
00:06:35.920have a very aggressive foreign policy against the surrounding neighbours. And I wanted to read the
00:06:42.980first part from this, because it really pays to listen to how Apollonius himself frames and presents
00:06:51.420Amicus to us. So he says, there were the cattle stalls and pens of Amicus, proud king of the
00:06:59.600Barbrechians, whom a nymph, Bithynian Mylae, had borne to Poseidon Genothlius, with whom she had
00:07:06.880lane. He was the most outrageous of men, and even upon strangers he had imposed a shameless
00:07:13.560ordinance. No one might depart before trying his luck against the king in boxing, and many men
00:07:20.860from neighbouring territories had thus met their end. On this occasion, too, when he came down to
00:07:27.700the ship, he arrogantly scorned to inquire of their mission and their identity, but at once
00:07:34.440address him as follows. Listen, you sea wanderers, to things which it is proper for you to know.
00:07:42.200It is a law that no stranger who has come to the land of the Bibrekians may depart until he has
00:07:48.560lifted up his hands in combat against mine. Therefore choose the best man from among you all,
00:07:55.360and set him to box against me here and now. If you choose to ignore and trample upon my laws,
00:08:02.220you will find that the consequences will be grim and violent. So he spoke in his haughtiness.
00:08:10.480Wild anger seized the Argonauts when they heard, and the threat struck Polydeiches most of all.
00:08:17.520At once he stood as his comrade's champion and replied,
00:08:21.500Enough. Do not practice your wretched brutishness upon us, whomever you claim to be. We shall fall
00:08:28.260in with your laws as you have stated them i myself now willingly undertake to fight you
00:08:34.040and so i i like immediately the fact that again it's not just jason and the argonauts so jason
00:08:41.620does everything and the argonauts just kind of like you know sit around as his hype men like
00:08:47.800it's a it's a truly collaborative effort everyone every argo gets argonaut gets a moment to shine
00:08:54.600They get their heroic deeds, something that propels them that bit further along the steppe than they would have gone otherwise.
00:09:02.100Yeah, it's essentially the sea of the state of that age.
00:09:06.600Plato uses this analogy, I think, in the Republic.
00:09:09.740He mentions the sea of the state, the ship of the state.
00:10:20.880It happens in every age. And my hunch is to believe that 99%, it's a personal subjective issue that people would love to be younger. They don't like growing up. So this has always been the case. And the narrative of perpetual decline and social disintegration has always been with us.
00:10:42.860and what is funny is that we may look back to the ancient times and say yeah the the ancients
00:10:49.300were great and we are the bad ones but even then they were looking back into the past and they
00:10:55.180were saying no the golden age is behind us now we're now we're in the iron age yeah so it's
00:11:02.080another way of saying well these old ones they had that agonistic spirit which is much more noble
00:11:08.200than us and we are locked in a in a sad state where it's not that the best man always wins
00:11:15.680it's much more of a collaborate effort and there is tremendous collateral damage yes along the way
00:11:21.480because if you look at that kind of warfare it's not like in the the movie troy the beginning right
00:11:28.020you have two champions achilles slays the other guy yes and that army instantly goes with a with
00:11:36.120greeks who were championed by achilles things went way more destructive later yeah absolutely
00:11:44.200and and we see um here and it's sorry for me to add this it's that there is a kind of tragedy there
00:11:52.600in that you can compete fairly without winning and and we see in amicus as well the fact that
00:12:01.160It is egregious to the gods that this fight is even taking place
00:12:06.140because actually it betrays hospitality, right?
00:16:31.640when it comes to Odysseus and his crew in his cavern, and we then have the suitors who are
00:16:39.800violating hospitality, who are violating the opposite law. They disrespect, they abuse Odysseus,
00:16:47.800Penelope's, and Telemachus' hospitality, and both get their comeuppance. And here the same thing
00:16:55.560happens with Amicus. He F.A. then he F.O.'d.
00:17:00.920Yes. And also as well, once we see, I mean, to speak of the fact as well that Amicus is really
00:17:08.200foreshadowing an even more uncompromising figure later on in the story, in the case of King Eates,
00:17:17.000who's over in Colchis, as the big bad of the story, for want of a better way to put it.
00:17:22.680But as soon as Pollux accidentally manslaughters Amicus and he falls to the ground, all of Amicus's men immediately start wanting vengeance for the king and start fighting.
00:17:37.340And Jason and a few of the other Argonauts immediately get their weapons out and obviously start coming to the defense of their own man as well.
00:17:45.440And the difference in skill is described in such a way where Apollonius says it was like a wolf amongst the sheep, or it was like gas being put amongst the bees, because the Argonauts are just so much more impressive than the men around him.
00:18:05.020And I think there's something symbolic in that as well, which is it speaks to the fact that the Babrekians are just unable to stand against the Argonauts because each of the Argonauts is a very accomplished warrior and in a way are their own hero.
00:18:23.600whereas in the case of the Bibrecchians, these are just thralls, they're actually nobodies.
00:18:31.460Because Amicus just consolidated all of the power, all of the glory, all of the ability to prove
00:18:38.080himself in himself at every opportunity. And so everyone else is just quite green.
00:18:43.740Yeah, he in a way disarmed them. One thing we have to ask here, and I'm not drawing any conclusion,
00:19:44.220Yeah, they loot and plunder the Berbreccian lands, and then they get back on the Argo, and oh, behave.
00:19:54.000And then we get to a really remarkable and quite a large part of the story, which is they end up meeting Phineas.
00:20:04.740And this is quite an extensive part, and it's obviously quite a famous part as well.
00:20:09.500Now, Phineas is the son of Agonor, and Agonor, for those who don't know, was also the father of Cadmus as well.
00:20:19.640And so when Europa was kidnapped by Zeus, many of Agonor's sons went out into the Mediterranean to go and look for Europa.
00:20:28.800And of course, Cadmus founds the city of Thebes at the behest of Athena, and we saw about how all of that comes to ruin when we covered the Bacchae by Euripides, and we see what happens to the house of Cadmus.
00:20:42.140But though this is taking place after those events, Phineas is still alive because he has been cursed by Zeus, because he is a prophet like Cassandra.
00:20:55.380He is a seer and he's able to read the futures and the fortunes of others.
00:20:59.920But Zeus has cursed him because Phineas was foolish and clumsy
00:21:08.440and revealed the entirety of someone's destiny to them
00:21:13.780and left no room for misinterpretation.
00:21:17.340And so for revealing too much of the mind of Zeus,
00:21:20.940Zeus cursed Phineas to be blind, to be aging, to age beyond his time
00:21:28.980and to be perpetually old, which is why he's still alive.
00:21:33.280But it's a case of like, yeah, he's alive far longer than he should be,
00:22:14.640So he was granted the privilege and he sort of abused it because the gods wanted him to give only very selective, impartial and fragmentary information.
00:22:26.480To nudge people in the right direction.
00:22:35.720There is a sort of contradiction in almost every story when it comes to gods and human agents before the concept of free will was developed.
00:22:50.000Because you simultaneously think that gods are responsible for everything, but also the human beings are responsible for their actions.
00:22:58.320And that's a huge tension, which is almost everywhere present in Greek mythology and other mythologies.
00:23:08.920I don't know if other, but it's definitely there in Greek mythology.
00:23:12.420And one of the interesting things also about the oracle is that when it comes to the delivery of oracle, of what the seer said, the verdict of the seer, it always had to be ambiguous.
00:23:31.800That was the thing because people had to start interpreting it instead of taking it as a face value.
00:23:38.160It wasn't just that's it, that's the word of the God and it's given
00:23:44.420and you are just given the word of the God and you aren't going to think about it.
00:23:49.040It was you had to think about it because part of it had to do with self-knowledge
00:23:55.460and it's not a coincidence that one of the engravings on the Oracle of Delphi
00:24:17.080And also as well, the fact that if, as Phinehas did,
00:24:22.660he reveals the entirety of Zeus's plan for this particular person
00:24:29.420or that particular person, that loosens the sort of dependency
00:24:36.720that the mortals have on the gods, because you don't have to constantly
00:24:41.120sacrifice to them and pray to them and devote yourselves to them
00:24:45.160because you have already been told exactly what is fated to happen to you.
00:24:50.340And so we see this constantly in the way that though there have been
00:24:54.620numerous examples already in the story of where people like Nereus
00:24:59.080and Glaucus have come to the aid of the Argonauts, for example. So they have witnessed divine
00:25:05.480intervention in their own story. But that doesn't actually stop them throughout the entire tale,
00:25:12.440giving sacrifices to Apollo, erecting shrines throughout the journey as they go on. They're
00:25:18.420constantly putting themselves in deference, under deference to the gods. But obviously,
00:25:23.980as I say, with Phineas, it's a case of revealing too much and therefore basically freeing humanity
00:25:33.440from the oversight of the gods, which is, of course, not acceptable and is one of the other
00:25:40.680reasons why Prometheus was punished for giving humanity more than the gods wanted them to have.
00:25:47.060and so Zeus punishes him by this in not only making him perpetually old not only in making
00:25:55.860him blind but also in making him starve as well and it's really brutal and Apollonius describes it
00:26:03.540in such grim but vivid detail of the fact that you know like there is like nothing beneath the
00:26:10.800skin but bone he is really really struggling and throughout all of this as well there are
00:26:16.340there are local people who are constantly going to him for their fortunes and want to
00:26:21.040have a reading for their future. But at the same time, they are offering Phineas food
00:26:28.920as a thank you for getting a reading for their future. And this food is constantly taken from
00:26:36.140him by the harpies, who are vicious creatures and are really just enjoying watching Finnair
00:26:47.100suffer. And not only do, when he's going to take the food, do they swoop down and take it from his
00:26:53.240hands, so he's constantly tempted by the food but can never eat it. When he does finally, with what
00:27:00.940food that is left as well they leave this stench on it yeah that is so foul so repugnant that he
00:27:08.200can't even contemplate eating it and so he's constantly punished first and foremost with
00:27:13.440starvation however there is he's like a gooner with a safety search
00:27:18.640yeah that's it because he is what what a parallel because he he has the desire
00:27:28.160and he's just there every he wants to eat which is human yeah yeah and food is just around
00:27:35.680it's all around him but you just can't access any of it yeah absolutely um however there is
00:27:42.500a silver lining, because Phineas also knows from prophecy that is not his own, that Jason
00:27:51.840and the Argonauts are going to come along to his island, and eventually this curse will
00:27:59.360be lifted from him. There is a future that is not just more of this. And so even though
00:28:08.560he's blind, as soon as Jason and the Argonauts arrive on the shoreline, Phineas is immediately
00:28:14.680ready to meet them. He's looking forward to the first good meal in a while. And he goes through
00:28:22.860this lengthy monologue about basically everything that we've recounted now, about what his curse is,
00:28:27.900why he was cursed, and how he's constantly tortured by the harpies. And also as well,
00:28:35.940that in this prophecy it was said that the sons of boreas would have a key part to play in this so
00:28:42.780just as in the last island with the bubricians we'd had pollux and his moment to shine now we
00:28:49.540get the boreans we get zetes and um callies callies as well and they are to chase after
00:28:58.560chase the harpies away uh whilst phineas is able to to tuck into a toby calvary in those
00:29:04.760Yeah, to indulge himself. And so the Argonauts set up this wonderful plan to basically lay a banquet ready for Phineas. And then when they use this as bait to draw the harpies down, the Boreads, who are, let's not forget, able to fly because they have wings in the side of their ankles.
00:29:25.620And I think before I might have incorrectly said that they have wings out the sides of their head as well.
00:29:31.760I've seen numerous portrayals of them and they're all a little different.